


Impossible stuff

by Yuu_chi



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Bronan friendship feels, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Ronan's magical tattoo, Unspecified relationship drama, the ot5 is still going strong, they just need some maintenance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-12
Updated: 2015-07-12
Packaged: 2018-04-08 23:32:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,885
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4325046
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Yuu_chi/pseuds/Yuu_chi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Because when Gansey is away and Adam is to blame and Ronan is broken, it's Blue that picks up the pieces.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Impossible stuff

Ronan’s been missing for close to two days when Blue finds him.

“Maggot,” he calls, sounding positively cheerful as he raises what looks suspiciously like a whisky bottle at her in friendly greeting. A good half of the amber liquid sloshes out to splatter messily on his hand and wrist and chest.

Blue stares at him, one hand still resting on the rusty knob of the Barn’s front door.

He’s on his back in the middle of the entryway, pissed as fuck and shirtless so that she can see every nick and scar and tatt that spirals over his skin. He smells positively foul too; bitter and dizzying like he’s been on a three day bender.

He probably has, she realizes; he’s probably been at this from the moment Adam set foot on the plane.

The relief at seeing him alive gives way to a terrifying rush of anger; all-consuming and numbing in the way it washes like fire-warm sludge down her veins. She doesn’t even think about it when she strides forward and kicks him as hard in the side as she dares.

“ _Jesus Christ –_ what the _fuck_?” Ronan yelps, dropping the bottle so that it clatters messily to the floor, curling up in on himself as Blue takes aim at the closest part of him that she can reach with her other foot. She staggers a little because she’s easily half Ronan’s size and wearing flats, but the effort she puts into it gets her point across sufficiently.

“You – I can’t even – do you have _any_ idea…” she’s too mad for words and they trip and fumble out between them. She tries to kick him again but Ronan grabs at her ankle. “How _dare_ you, Ronan Lynch. _How dare you_.”

“How dare _I_?” He asks incredulously, fingers digging into the skinny bones over the arch in her foot. “I’m not the one breaking into people’s houses and beating them the fuck up, am I?”

“No,” Blue hisses, tearing her ankle free and squatting down to his level so she can poke him in the chest with one wrathful finger. “You’re the asshole who dropped off the face of the earth without a single word.”

Ronan grunts, bats her hand away and rolls over into his side. His arms tuck up under his head and Blue gets a very clear view of his tattoo for the first time since she’d walked in the door.

It’s… angry.

Black and blurred and twisty like snakes. The beautiful Celtic knotwork feels unraveled somehow. She’s never found it pretty, exactly, but today it seems to be trying its hardest to be positively wretched; it’s all curled up in on itself like a dead spider, and in the moment between one blink and the next she swears it shrinks further.

Blue’s always known that everything about Ronan was just that little bit magic and that his tattoo was certainly not an exception, but she doesn’t know if she’s ever seen it … like this.

The anger drains from her in a slow, lazy pull. She tries desperately to cling to it – it shouldn’t be so hard; she’s nearly always angry at Ronan for something or another – but just this once she can’t quite manage.

Ronan Lynch has never looked as pathetic and miserable as he does now; skin sweat-damp and his whole body rejecting everyone and everything around him.

Blue sighs and gives up on the whole scolding parent thing for now and settles down on the floor next to him more comfortably. Ronan doesn’t say a word but she sees his shoulders climb just that little higher to nestle up below his ears.

“Two days, Lynch,” Blue says. “ _Two days_.”

He grunts at her and cranes his neck to shoot her a withering look. “You’re not my babysitter.”

“No,” Blue said hotly, “but I _am_ your friend.”

Ronan wrinkles his nose at her but doesn’t say anything.

“Gansey was worried.”

“Gansey’s always worried,” Ronan says which – well, it’s not entirely inaccurate, but Blue is well versed in Ronan’s attempts of misdirection.

“Do you know why he’s always worried?” She doesn’t give him a chance to answer. “Because you give him a reason to be. It’s things like _this_ ,” she gestures over him in one swooping hand wave; the empty bottles and naked skin and all the things in between, “that make people worry about you. I take my eyes off you for literally half a second and you’re off drinking your weight in liquor and otherwise behaving like you’re sixteen all over again.”

“You don’t know shit,” Ronan hisses at her, and he goes to push himself upright but the message gets crossed somewhere around his           alcohol soaked synapses and he winds up crumpling back down as his palm slips on the whisky that he’d spilled earlier.

Blue laughs at him; unfriendly and unkind. “That is exactly what I mean.”

Ronan blinks at her; a slow up and down of deceptively long lashes, and Blue – she could absolutely _kill_ the boy right about now.

“You’re the epitome of self-destruction, Ronan Lynch. Did it ever even occur to you that if you’re hurting or upset that you could maybe _talk_ to one of us about it. Fuck, it’s not like you’re in shortage of friends, believe it or not. You’ve got Gansey and Noah and – and _me_.”

She deliberately doesn’t say Adam’s name and it sits heavy and obvious between them for a moment.

Ronan’s looking at his fingers; the pale lines of them spread out wet on the scuffed flooring between them, white about the knuckles and the nails positively gouging into the wood.

He doesn’t say anything back – not that she really expected him to, because words were the kind of positive communication one just couldn’t expect from the likes of Ronan Lynch – and after a moment she sighs, reaching up to unwind her scarf from around her neck with one hand and taking Ronan’s wrist with the other.

He lets her. She’d like to think it says a lot about the kind of trust that they’ve managed to develop between them, but it’s just as likely that Ronan is just too drunk to refuse.

She puts careful care into wiping his fingers dry, swiping the sticky whisky away with careful scrubs.

Holding Noah’s hand had been cold and giggly; friendly anticipation and curious touches. Gansey’s was warm and comfortable; so very large against her own. Adam had been long fingers and boyish charm; new and foreign and exciting.

Ronan was none of that. Ronan was the rough palms of a street racer and a curling about his knuckles like he couldn’t figure out whether he wanted to pull away or hold tighter. It was the grip of someone who was somehow both lonely but taken in all meanings of the word.

The thought comes without really meaning to; that Adam’s fingers were longer but Ronan’s palms wider; that they probably fit together like puzzle pieces when they touched.

All of a sudden Blue understood why losing something like that might drive Ronan to something like this.

“You should call him,” Blue says into the quiet between them, and Ronan’s hand goes stiff in hers.

“Gansey?” Ronan asks, and his voice is deceptively calm but Ronan has always been much too bright to play dumb convincingly.

Blue looks up from where she’s been staring fixedly at the leather bands of his wrist. “Adam,” she says.

Ronan’s eyes close and he breathes out something that sounds closer to a wheeze. For a moment Blue thinks he’s going to be sick, but Ronan has always been something of a professional when it comes to inhaling more booze than is really advisable.

She tightens her grip on his hand in case he tries to pull away – not sure why, exactly, but knowing that the last thing he should be doing right now is pushing her away – but he doesn’t.

Instead his hand twists, fingers slinking down to slide into the grooves between hers so that they’re legitimately hand holding now.

There’s a part of her that still thinks _I’m holding hands with Ronan Lynch_ like it’s something foreign and unthinkable, but the part of her that is Blue Sargent and not a nineteen year old girl who has spent most her life thinking the Raven Boys untouchable goes _I’m making sure my best friend doesn’t break_.

She doesn’t know exactly what set this off, what went down between them before Adam left to go back to college three states over, but she’s clever and Ronan’s a mess and both of those boys were spectacularly, stupidly in love.

If their lives had ever been anything approaching normal maybe they’d have been able to do this whole thing nicer; maybe Blue would have gotten to watch two of the people she loves most in the world find happiness with each other; slow and comfortable and made up of small moments that become big.

Instead it had gone like this; big moments that grow bigger and bigger and bigger until they break, screaming fights and nasty silences and the whole group pretending that they didn’t see the bags under Adam’s eyes or the white to Ronan’s face.

But it was also pretending she didn’t see the way they looked at each other, or the hands on knees beneath Nino tables, opening doors without knocking and finding them curled up on each other asleep and clinging like it was the last time they’d be able to.

It was knowing that her boys were too bright to be so stupid; young and dumb and reckless. That sixteen had always been too early to plan for a happily ever after, but too late to cut away whatever it was that kept them bound to each other.

It was knowing that whatever happened they’d always come back to each other again and again and again until eventually they stuck.

For the moment though it’s Blue’s hand in Ronan’s and Ronan’s head slowly coming to rest on the hunch of her shoulder; no tears because Ronan Lynch didn’t cry over things like break-ups or fights or whatever, but a breath that was too quick on her skin to be entirely calm.

It’s knowing that by the time she’s thirty Blue will have done this a half dozen more times.

She sighs again and eases back, bringing them to lean against the wall behind them and settling in for a long night of Ronan dozing fitfully at her side and sore backs come morning.

There’s a muffled sound against her neck and it takes Blue a whole minute to realize it was Ronan speaking.

“What?”

He says it again, just as quiet as the first time: “Sorry.”

It’s not an apology the way it would be with someone else, but something else altogether. Blue doesn’t know if she’s ever heard Ronan apologize for anything. Whatever it is though; it means something.

 _This boy is an idiot and you’re angry with him_ , she tries to tell herself, but she’s still got one hand in Ronan’s and the other resting on his back and she fancies that she can feel the flutter and bloom of the tattoo beneath her palm.

“Shut up and go to sleep, Lynch,” she says.

And he does.

 

**Author's Note:**

> I feel like Ronan and Adam would be the type to have a lot of spectacular fights when they're young, break-up a few times even. But they always wind up getting back together and eventually when they're older and there's less drama in their lives they'd be able to settle down properly and be the disgustingly mushy couple they've always wanted to be. 
> 
> In the mean time, Blue would be the one who has to keep an eye on Ronan while Gansey and Adam are off at college and of course they become ridiculous besties because they're made from the same stuff and all.


End file.
